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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 12 Hansard (5 December) . . Page.. 3696 ..
MR MOORE: You did. You actually said "stop" and then you later used the words "they are structured to inhibit the capacity of the ALP coming up to an election". I just want to clarify this and make sure that members do understand that this is a dollar - for - dollar situation, where a donation is made for a political party.
Then Mr Quinlan went on to say that this is discriminatory, and in fact ought to be considered and legally tested under discrimination legislation. I welcome legal testing, because I am absolutely sure that it is not discriminatory in that sense. The sense that it is discriminatory is the same sense in which there is discrimination currently in place for this particular form of revenue raising. There is discrimination in place concerning poker machines.
We have given a monopoly as a community. This legislature gives a monopoly to clubs to run poker machines. We maintain a monopoly for clubs to have the poker machines. Not just anybody can use them, and we know that that monopoly on poker machines delivers over $100 million in clear profit from those machines.
There are none so blind that will not see, and that is the case with Mr Hargreaves. I do not understand where you are coming from, Mr Hargreaves. It is very simple. There is a very special privilege associated with poker machines and it is about that special privilege.
If the amendments were to, say, specifically target the Labor Party and say that you can give political donations, but you cannot give them to the Labor Party, or when those donations go to the Labor Party you have to have these special conditions attached them, of course that would be discriminatory and of course that would be entirely inappropriate. This applies right across the system.
Finally, it was interesting that Mr Quinlan seems to think this is the lowest day in the Assembly. Where has he been in the last six months as people accuse other members of breaking the law again and again, and here we have Mr Berry -
Mr Berry: And they did -
MR MOORE: No, they did not. You are wrong. You insisted on that because that is the style of Mr Berry's politics and that is the style of Mr Stanhope's politics. That has delivered the lowest day. This is not the lowest day by any stretch of the imagination. It may be the lowest day in the terms of principle for the Labor Party - and Mr Hargreaves referred to this, but I have been on about this since long before he came in here. Because there is this very special discrimination in favour of the clubs, I still believe the Labor Party has a very clear - cut conflict of interest, as was expressed beautifully in the Canberra Times editorial not so long ago.
Mr Speaker, that is the lowest part: that these people still come in here and still vote on something that will assist them in the way that these poker machines do.
MR BERRY
(8.48): Mr Moore and everybody else votes on their garbage collection and their rates and everything else. We can draw those distinctions in terms of conflict of interest wherever we like. Mr Moore says, "Read the editorial of the Canberra Times."
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